Coping with Garden Bugs

One of the reasons why organic gardening can come as a real challenge is the limit on insect (pest) control methods. Green living means saving the ecological habitat from noxious pesticides. While environment and health may be smiling in relief at the non-use of toxic chemicals, our eco-conscious gardener is apparently at a loss here. But not really! A number of safe and environmental-friendly means of pest control can be practiced to obtain a healthy yield in plenty.

Organic gardeners, unless they are just about to begin with the gardening practice, know that selective plantation of certain plant species/families obviates the need of using any insecticides. A large number of herbs and vegetables – including radish, pea, turnip, sweet potato, beet, and onion etc – develop with little threat from insects. However, there are crops that fall a prey to garden bugs. These include potato, cauliflower, broccoli, beans, cucumber, pumpkin, and many other food plants. The first thing to do for an organic gardener, therefore, is to mark the pest-resistant and pest-prone varieties of crops.

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Waste Prevention for Environmental-Friendly Living

For decades, advocates of green living have focused on disposing the daily waste in the least hazardous ways. Waste disposal has been an issue worth millions of dollars each year in a single developed country alone. Only more recently have the eco-conscious people started to underscore the prevention of waste as the more environmental-friendly strategy rather than spending millions on getting rid of it safely. This led to the global movement of Zero Waste – a holistic approach combining various environmental-friendly phases for product development.

The primary aim of Zero Waste is to prevent as much of the harmful waste as possible by modeling various processes of product development on natural processes. The main considerations in this case are: product designing, redesigning, and packaging; publicity/advertisement; distribution and usage of the products; and environmental-friendly disassembling of products. There is obviously a strong academic aspect to the strategy of making these processes feasible since a careful assessment of the products’ designing on the environment has to be made by experts in environmental sciences and waste management. This approach has recently come to be known as cradle-to-cradle production.

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